Wednesday, August 24, 2005

I, Prototype

...unfortunately, Self was not the last object-orientedprogramming language. Self does have some claim to be the lastinteresting object-oriented programming language, or at least the lastinteresting modern OO language with most languages coming afterwards,C++, Java, C#, Cb, being as distinguisable as Coke from Pepsi orMalboro from Rothmans: you dont drink the drink, you drink theadvertising (Twitchell 2000). In Self, at least you can hear yourselfscream.

I must admit that I agree. The above quote is taken from the paper, Attack of The Clones.It's a paper that shows some of the patterns from GoF book implementedin Self. It has to be one of the best reads I've come across. It'scertainly entertaining. Here's some more:

Anotherlovely, natural example of dynamic inheritance in Self. You could dosomething almost as nice Smalltalk using doesNotUnderstand but theSmalltalk Companion doesnt talk about it because, well, theyre wimps(Alpert et al. 1988). You can also do exactly the same thing inSmalltalk using Wrappers (Brant, Foote, Johnson & Roberts 1998).

TheSmalltalk companion is one of my favorite books and I wouldn't callthem "wimps", but it just made me chuckle. And I can't forget this one:

How hardcore do you want to be?How many lifetimes to you want to waste?

Idon't want to be hardcore and I'm tired of wasting lifetimes...=) Thisarticle is just another one that is making me fall in love with Selfand prototype-based languages more and more. I can't wait to implementand play with these in Io.